NodeBB
Community
Forum software you can host yourself
Making the work
Growing an audience
Running the business
Flarum is forum software installed on your own server, so the discussion, the members and the domain belong to whoever runs it rather than to a platform. Extensions add what the core deliberately leaves out. There is no hosted tier and no monthly fee, which trades a bill for the work of running it. Anybody who does not want to think about PHP, a database and backups should buy hosted community software instead.
Free, open source, and self-hosted, with no paid tier and no hosted option sold by the project. The cost is the hosting bill and the maintenance, both of which are modest for a forum and neither of which is zero. Extensions are a mix of free and paid, sold by their own authors rather than through the project, so the real budget question is which of those a given community will need.
Somebody who has already decided that owning the community matters more than convenience, and who can keep a PHP application patched and backed up. The economics are unbeatable at scale because there are none. Anybody who would rather pay a monthly fee than think about a database, or who wants the community live this afternoon, should buy hosted software and not look back.
Price the hosting and an hour a month of your own time before calling this free, because that is what it actually costs and it is still far less than hosted community software. Choose it for ownership rather than for the saving, since the saving is real but the ownership is the part you cannot buy back later.
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